Welcome and check me out

My life is an open book! Actually, it is about 18 open books! And there are more on the horizon. You can find my innermost secrets at http://janetesmitstarbooks.tripod.com or at http://www.janetelainesmith.com .

I'd love to learn the secrets of the people who have turned their books into a success. I'd especially like to hear some success stories from fiction authors. So much of the information on marketing is geared towards non-fiction books.
But then I think about people like John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and a few others. How can we topple them from their Ivory Tower of best-sellingness? I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Some of the things I have done have worked. Why? I figure there are a couple of reasons: God, for some reason likes me, and I don't like to argue; and the things I tried were so simple that they couldn't NOT work, and I was so ignorant of the whole marketing business that I went ahead and tried them before anybody could tell me they wouldn't work. You can find all (well, almost all) of my secrets in my PromoPaks, which are available at http://starpublish.com in the ebookstore. They worked well enough to get me a best-selling Scottish book on Amazon for almost 3 months, win me 2 RIO (Reviewes Int'l. Org.) Awards of Excellence, and one of my books named "Best time travel of the year" by Affaire de Coeur Magazine. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I love a good pudding!

So spill, friends. What has worked for you, and what has made you the most frustrated?